


And the Whole World Waiting

by jibrailis



Category: Social Network (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-29
Updated: 2012-07-29
Packaged: 2017-11-10 23:12:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/471783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jibrailis/pseuds/jibrailis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her name is on the masthead, up at the top. <i>Erica Albright, co-founder</i>, right beside the ubiquitous <i>Christina Lee, founder and CEO</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And the Whole World Waiting

**1.**

She reinvents herself when she gets to college, trades her fruit-scented lip balms for sleek lipsticks with names of cities that she has never seen, dark red embers on her mouth that she finds almost embarrassing until she trains herself not to. She sits in front of her mirror until she gets it right, or she decides to wipe it off, and when she walks across the street in her new wedges, Mark Zuckerberg stops to stare.

She's eighteen and she's awkward in her body, but trying desperately not to show it. She used to run track in high school, never good enough to get scholarships but good enough to learn that the body can do almost anything you tell it to — and if Erica Albright, sociology major at Boston University, age eighteen, tells her body to _grow up, be graceful, don't humiliate me_ , then one day it does exactly that.

On her first date with Mark Zuckerberg, she feels preternaturally calm. She listens to everything he says while separating her sweet potato fries into two piles, both of which she eats with ketchup and a dash of salt. He talks about statistics, about the migration of birds in Massachusetts, about Homeric odes. When he asks her, "Do you read Greek?", she says no, but then adds, "But I do know Perl, if that counts."

"Huh," Mark says, and the quiet between them stretches longer than swans' necks. Then he eats one of her fries and frowns. "Ketchup," he says.

"Yeah," says Erica, who knows then what she should have known before she came to college, before her mother sat her down at their kitchen table, among the kiln-fired jars of salt and turmeric, and told her that this was her Future. Her mother speaks in capitals, all lopsided letters and upside-down voice. She thinks she might even know what that means, now. 

She returns to her dorm that night and turns on her computer. There's an email from her friend Georgia. FACEMASH!! is the subject heading. She clicks.

THE MEN OF HARVARD — HOT OR NOT?

Erica clicks out. She thinks of Mark's face on that site, Mark with his birds' soup hair and his wrists which trembled the first time he took off her bra — he struggled with it, and it made him angry, even though he hid it as well as she hid her own nervousness. She feels beyond that now, though, pulled awake by the first sign of winter — beyond Mark, beyond Facemash, beyond even the sight of her own cheek in her mirror, flushed with exhaustion. It's been a hell of a long day.

The first time she meets Christy Lee, creator of Facemash, it's at a talk given by Bill Gates. She's not sure why Christy would even show her face there. Everybody had mentioned the whole probation thing after Facemash got shut down. _It crashed a part of Harvard's network_ , Erica thinks, and she stares at the back of Christy's head in curiousity, looking at the black shine of it, and then at the two faint sun marks beside Christy's mouth when Christy turns around and stares back.

Erica acts nonchalant. Who, staring, me? But Bill Gates is pacing in front of the powerpoint, and Christy Lee, computer science major at Harvard, is sitting in the plastic seat close enough to touch, and Christy Lee — god, her name sounds like it belongs on a package of wholesome oatmeal cookies — regards her silently before smiling.

"I'm bored shitless. My friend Alice already left. You want to get out of here?" Christy asks, mock-whisper. A few rows in front and to the left, Erica can see Mark with his friend Eduardo, the way they've got their heads tilted towards each other, the way Eduardo is whispering furiously — and Erica smiles back.

"I'll be your Aladdin," Christy says. "Or even better: I'll be your genie in a bottle, baby." And Erica grabs her backpack and follows her out of the lecture.

 

**2.**

_Forget Facemash, think The Facebook_ , Christy says, and there's a heartbeat moment when Erica would launch a thousand ships for the sound of Christy's voice just how it is, hard and vicious and laughing all at the same time. In that moment, Christy is her Helen, her Paris, her Agamemnon that she would follow into war. 

Then she says, lifting her feet from Christy's bedspread, "You're going to run the site all by yourself?"

"No," Christy says. "Not all by myself. I don't have the money to start it." She looks at Erica without hiding any of what she's thinking, and Erica groans because yeah, it was always going to come back to this. Erica's the daughter of a successful small business owner. Erica's a trust fund baby, practically a WASP. Erica has money.

"One thousand," she says, and Christy squeezes her right into a hug that makes her ribs ache. "Ow, Jesus! Just one thousand! It's not like I'm rolling around in cash."

"Not yet," Christy says confidently, but she's already talking about how The Facebook is going to spread, how she's already got guys in the Finals Clubs using it, and once you get the Finals Clubs into it, it's going to spread like whooping cough. "It's the old boys network," Christy says in disdain, but her disdain isn't strong enough to stop her from using it. Erica sees how Christy flirts with the Harvard boys, sidling up to the Winklevoss twins in her heels and pleather skirt. Christy uses concealer to hide the sun marks by her mouth, and instead her lips are bruised plums as she laughs at Tyler Winklevoss' jokes, touching him lightly on the forearm, leaning in so that he smells her grapefruit perfume.

Christy comes back to Erica's room at night, sneaking across the expanse of two campuses. Erica rummages through her mini-fridge and tosses her a coke.

"Business," Christy opines. The sound of her jerking the tab open is as loud as steam. "Business is when you have to lie back and think of England. Am I right, am I right? It's the messy stuff, the boring stuff, the stuff you've got to push aside before you can do what you really want to do." She lifts up her bubbling can of coke and taps it against Erica's forehead, where the condensation is cool and wet. "You know business, though. From your mom."

Erica leans back on her bed, balances on her elbows. "I'm not going to run your business the way you like it. Fair warning. I've only helped my mom with her arts and crafts company. I've never done anything like... anything with computers."

"Don't fucking give me that," Christy says. "No doe-eyed New England girl knows how to code."

"Is that what they told you at Harvard?" Erica says, stretching out the last word until Christy starts laughing, big hiccupy laughs that are completely different from the quiet, appreciative giggles she gives to the boys. 

"I can't be the brains, the beauty, _and_ the brawn," Christy says. "Come on. You've got to share it with me. Be nice." She crawls over on the bed, and Erica swallows down on the ball in her throat.

"I'm always nice."

"Sure," Christy smirks. "My very own duchess."

"I'm going to regret this," Erica says, because that's what Erica Albright is, _sensible_ , but Christy is kissing her softly on the mouth, stealing the breath from her like spare change. She feels the weight of Christy on her knees, the smooth stroke of Christy's fingers through her hair, the smell of Dove soap on Christy's skin, and her murmured reassurances, as certain as fire burning down the house:

"No," and then a kiss; "No," another kiss; " _No_ ," kisses all over Erica's jaw and her fingers and the line up her arm, slow slow slow, system crash, no data recovery.

 

**3.**

Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Stanford — Erica keeps track of the numbers until they stop meaning anything to her, and all she can do is take her shoes off, sit cross-legged in her egonometric chair, and watch them grow.

 

 _Harvard_ :

Christy is plugged in, rocking back and forth to the sound of west coast hip hop in her earphones. Erica can count her rhythm in the skin beneath her fingernails — one two three four, and then Christy is flying through the code, hitting all the beats. It's like writing music, Christy says when she's finished, and when Erica looks at her, she can't help but think a little of madness. Christy's eyes sink closed when she's thinking, and when they snap open they always look a little dazed, as if it takes her a few seconds to remember where she is and what she's doing. There's empty bottles of soda by her elbow, half-finished tins of tea biscuits with crumbs forming ocean shores on her desk, and Erica says, "You need a break."

Christy frowns. "You're supposed to make me better, not lazier."

"Get up," Erica says. She walks over and hauls Christy to her feet. "We're having dinner and then we're doing your laundry."

"You just want to look at my panties," Christy says, and she kisses Erica on the cheek, sultry. 

"Yeah, that's my secret plan all along," Erica says, rolling her eyes as she shoves Christy towards the door and grabs her keys. "Facebook is just my cover. For being a panty thief."

"You scheming bitch," Christy laughs, and Erica takes her hand.

 

 _Columbia_ :

"Hey," says the guy on the bus, with the tortoiseshell glasses and the bleached white teeth. He's carrying a copy of _The Road to Wigan Pier_ under his arm. "Are you on Facebook?"

"The bus?" Christy says when Erica mentions it over lunch. They're squeezed into a booth at Mr. Bartley's Burger Cottage. There's plenty of space for them so that they could sit across from each other, but then Erica would never know the feeling of Christy's bare thigh sliding against her own underneath her woollen skirt. Some choices are easy to make. "We've got to get you a car. I can't have my CFO running around to meetings on _public transit_."

" _You_ take the bus," Erica reminds her.

"But you're classy," Christy says. "Just doesn't seem right, with your stockings and your buns and your don't-fuck-with-me stare." 

"I've got two meetings with local investors set up," Erica is reminded to say. She digs through her bag for her agenda, but Christy reaches over and stops her with a press of her hand.

"I'm setting one up myself," she says. "I want you to go. Sweet talk him out of his money."

"Who is it?" Erica asks absently, going back to rummaging for her agenda.

"Just some guy I met at a party once," Christy says. She twirls a strand of hair around a finger, tight as nooses. "Ever heard of Sean Parker?"

 

 _Yale_ :

It's her home page now, and every day she watches the updates roll in. 

**Christy Lee** _is having the best milkshake of her life omg_.

**Christy Lee** _can't decide: the red dress or the purple one :D_  


**Christy Lee** _doesn't give a shit today_.

"Our fearless leader," Erica mutters under her breath, and Dustin Moscovitz is leaning against the wall waiting for her to order him a coffee. She met him because he was Mark's friend, but Erica's managed to steal him since. Boy knows how to code. Not as well as Christy, but no one is quite like Christy.

"She's awesome," Dustin says brightly. "But also awesomely unhinged."

Well yeah, Erica thinks. It takes a certain something to be nineteen, not even legal drinking age, and creating a website that every major student campus in America is starting to use. Not just use either, in the casual way where you check for updates once a week — people are starting to _live lives_ through Facebook, dating and breaking up and posting wedding photos. It's the experience of college made virtual, is how Erica explains it to her mother's friends, the investors, and also to Sean Parker the first time she meets him over sushi and tempura.

"Did he try to grope you?" Christy asks after the meeting. Erica finds her sitting outside her dorm room, coding. "Hey, I can't find my key. Let me in, will you?"

By now Erica has copies of all of Christy's keys. She slots hers into the keyhole. "No, he didn't try to grope me," she says as she nudges the door open. It smells kind of funny inside, like Christy's forgotten to throw old food out. That's what Christy's like when she's working: a mess, a slob, an adventurer with a temper the size of K2.

"He's got no taste," Christy says, following her in.

 

 _Stanford_ :

There's Facebook, and there's them, and after a while Erica stops being able to tell the difference between the two. Her computer screen glows blue and white as Christy strips down to her panties, throwing her sweatshirt and her sandals over her shoulder. It's geek casual today, but tomorrow it might be something else entirely — Christy has shown up in tight red minidresses before, shimmying across Erica's dorm room before crawling onto her lap and biting her earlobe. Every day it's different, a new identity walking in, and Erica doesn't know. Doesn't know what will make Christy flirty one day and sullen the next, doesn't know how to negotiate this thing they're doing, the kissing fucking being together thing, when all the while Christy's Facebook profile reads single.

"The CEO of Facebook should know how to change her own relationship status," she confesses to Dustin one day, but then she feels embarrassed about it. Unprofessional, which is weird because Dustin's her age and they've played Mario Kart together until they've fallen asleep on each other's laps. But that's another way things are different now. Erica's no longer a student entrepreneur. She's the CFO of a very promising company, and Dustin is an employee.

Dustin laughs when she explains it. "You know Mark and Eduardo wanted to do something similar when they saw Facemash," he says. "Bet they'd never treat me different after."

"But Mark and Eduardo are Harvard men. Boys." Erica rubs her hands over her eyes. "You wouldn't get it. It's all different. Being a girl. Woman. Whatever. Having a vagina. I don't want investors to sit across from me and go, _oh her, she's too emotional_."

"Erica," Dustin says, "you're not. Too emotional? Please. That's Christy to the T. That's why she's got you."

Facebook is growing, growing, growing. There are the numbers and there are the stories and then there's Christy on her cell phone in Erica's room, three o'clock in the morning, talking to her parents in Hong Kong until she's yelling at them, hissing words until she starts crying. When she hangs up, Erica wraps her arms around her while Christy tears tissues into vicious, jagged pieces. "They're from the old country. They don't think a girl should be—" She bares her teeth. "I wasn't ever supposed to be smart."

"Fuck them," Erica says sincerely. Christy twists around to look at her, mascara streaking her eyes like factory smoke. "Fuck them," Erica repeats. "We go where we want to go."

"Even if it's Palo Alto?" Christy asks, and Erica's response dies.

 

 

**4.**

She doesn't go to Palo Alto.

"Fine," Christy says, her mouth pressed tight. She's stomping around the room, throwing her dresses and her books into suitcases, every movement tense and wound up, a toy soldier. "I get it. You want to finish your degree. Your precious second-rate Boston University degree."

"It's my _education_ ," Erica says helplessly. "I can't just drop out of school. It's not like I'm giving up Facebook. I'm still 100% behind it. I'll be your acting CFO. I've got an internship in New York starting in three weeks. I'll use all my connections to net us an angel investor."

Christy picks up her lighter and flicks it on. There's the flame, small and sputtering, but in Christy's hands it might as well be a sermon, a voice in the darkness. Christy isn't listening at all anymore. Erica pushes on: "It's not forever," she tries to explain, but Christy suddenly shouts at her.

"Forget it! I don't want to listen! If you want to stay, then goddamn it! _Stay!_ "

So Erica stays. 

Her breath fades behind her tonsils, and her skin feels cold and itchy, like she's having an allergic reaction. But she stays, and Christy doesn't answer any of her emails or text messages for an entire month. It's always Dustin who passes on the relevant information, Dustin who's their patient go-between, and when Erica logs in to Facebook, she tries not to look at the photos of Christy in a bikini, lounging at a pool beside Sean Parker.

Erica Albright is not a college dropout. Erica Albright lies in her dorm room and reads Adorno and Durkheim and Margaret Mead for class, going to lectures with her notebooks organized and her shirts freshly laundered. When she's finished with class, she works on Facebook, chasing down investors, drafting long-term financial plans, wrangling contracts over advertising. She falls asleep at three, four in the morning, clutching her cell phone in her hand, wondering if Christy will ever call.

Christy calls. It's past midnight on a Tuesday, and Erica is looking over some of the numbers Dustin sent her from the servers. Her phone rings, and she answers it without checking the caller I.D. "Hello?" she says, and nearly drops the phone at the sound of Christy's lazy, affectionate "hey you." 

"I saw some new photos of you on Facebook," Christy says. "You know what, babe? You need a tan."

Erica is already smiling. "I've got a week off my internship. I can manage it."

But this is a lesson she should have learned all along: no one picks her up at Palo Alto. She goes there for Christy Lee, beautiful fucked up brilliant fire-mad Christy Lee, and in the end, when Christy sees her at the door, soaked in rain, it's as if she's an afterthought. Christy's deep into programming, or she's deep into beer pong with Sean Parker — Erica honestly can't tell the difference, and the other truth is: she never knew she could be this angry. She has always been the quiet one, the calm one, mature beyond her years, but the rage that smokes through her lungs is a revelation. _Do I mean anything to you_ , she wants to ask, but everyone is in the room, staring, and Erica is running herself to ruin, betraying her emotions, betraying her role as CFO, betraying herself.

"Oh, you're here. I want to talk to you about the ads," Christy begins. "It's a terrible idea and you—"

Erica was never supposed to be like this. This was never supposed to happen. She was supposed to go off to college, read a few Jane Austen novels, write a few articles in the student newspaper, find a boyfriend, get a job as an editor at a respectable publishing house, get married to said boyfriend, have kids, go to India to rediscover herself, get a pension. She was never supposed to be here, near to crying in the California rain while Christy Lee stares at her like she's a person who's ceased to exist, a name scheduled in an agenda, no one important.

For a moment, she has the strange, self-destructive urge to call Mark Zuckerberg.

"I got you a scarf," Erica says. She throws it at Christy disdainfully, and then she does one better: Christy's laptop is lying within arm's length, so she throws that too. 

Ten days later Erica's shares in the company are diluted from 34% to 0.03%, and when she leaves a message in Christy's voicemail, she sounds preternaturally calm, cool and collected, ice wouldn't melt. She says, "Lawyer up, asshole," and then hangs up.

 

 

**5.**

When she is twenty-two, Erica Albright is a millionaire. She has a sociology degree from Boston University, and she has a house in Maine, by the water, with a gated fence and a room for her parents if they want to visit. There are gardens with the house, blooming with Black-eyed Susans and spiderwort, and Erica should hire a gardener but she doesn't. She lets the flowers grow wild, climbing the cracked dirt while she sits on the porch in the summers, nursing her lemonade and staring out at the flat horizon. 

She divides her time between Maine and New York, where she has freelance editing job at an indie Broadway review. They send her work, most of which she completes in Maine, and she travels to the head office once a month to meet with her editors and sit through staff get-togethers. The other editors are all older than she is. Only the interns are her age, and one of them sidles up to her at the water cooler one afternoon and says, offhandedly, "I love your dress."

"Thanks," Erica says, tugging at the hem. It's Alexander McQueen, and she suddenly feels self-conscious about wearing it, flaunting her money, but the intern doesn't seem to notice or care about her discomfort. She just smiles and goes back to her desk. It's a relief, but also a small hurt, because it's so easy for women on the street to stop her and compliment her on her dresses, but no one has ever said to her, _you were a good CFO, you did Facebook proud_.

Officially, her name is on the masthead, up at the top. _Erica Albright, co-founder_ , right beside the ubiquitous _Christina Lee, founder and CEO_ , and that's a measure of fame, isn't it, because the news media are calling her Christina now. Christina Lee, the young tech upstart, Christina Lee, the rising princess of Silicon Valley, Christina Lee, changing the way people communicate. Erica sees her in interviews sometimes, charming and impish, everybody's darling. Christina Lee, dating Napster founder Sean Parker. Christina Lee, at Oscar de la Renta's birthday party. 

Erica Albright is twenty-two, and a millionaire, and when she says to her mother "go into business, break your heart," she means it. 

But she never quite brings herself to delete her Facebook page, and maybe that's the truest, most meaningful testament to what she and Christy built. _Go into business, change the world_ , she thinks when she's feeling more optimistic, and then one day, when she comes in from the gardens with her skin smelling like junegrass, there's a new status update on her feed.

 **Christy Lee** _misses Erica Albright_.

 **Christy Lee** _is sorry_.

She's twenty-two, and a millionaire, and a failure, and all around her the gardens are growing and the world is changing. She can't ever go back, but her hands shake with familiarity, like the first time she ever turned off the lights in a dark room and let Christy smooth her tank top straps over her shoulders. Erica reaches over with her mouse and clicks 'like.'

 

**6.**

It's been raining all morning in Maine, and Christy Lee is on her doorstep, soaked.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] And the Whole World Waiting](https://archiveofourown.org/works/501276) by [growlery](https://archiveofourown.org/users/growlery/pseuds/growlery)




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